Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell

The stock Ubuntu repositories don’t include the w32codecs (wmvdmod.dll, etc) so xine, mplayer can play WMV and other formats. Basically the package puts 127 DLLs in /usr/lib/w32codecs.

So, I temporarily added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ testing main

And then did this:


apt-get update && apt-get install w32codecs


I then commented that line out since and apt-get upgrade would have picked up a bunch of updated packages from that repository.

I’ve been running Debian/Sarge (now the stable branch) on my laptop for quite a while now and its time to try a new distro for dailyl use — Ubuntu. This week I’ve been running Ubuntu ‘Hoary’ and the transition has been very smooth.

The only configuration issue was I wanted to use ALSA on this HP Compaq nc6000 laptop. The install did detect the sound device, but did separate the speaker from
the headphone controls.

phzi on #ubuntu pointed me to the unofficial UbuntuGuide.org, specifically the section configuresoundproperly. Those instructions were perfect.

Since my job description contains the words Linux and ProLiant Servers, this makes me pretty happy — HP leads worldwide Linux server market. The news has been going round
internally at HP, along with selling the 10 Millionth ProLiant server

HP has set an industry-first milestone by shipping more than 1 million Linux servers to customers since 1998, 45 percent more than any other major hardware vendor.

HP has led the worldwide Linux server market for 29 consecutive quarters. In the first quarter of 2005, HP grew 2.5 percentage points faster than the market in units on a year-over-year basis, shipped nearly 10 times as many Linux servers as Sun, led IBM by almost 8 percentage points in quarterly revenue share and outpaced Dell in both units and revenue.

MySQL Conference 05: Outside the Keynote

Originally uploaded by x180.
Credit: “James Duncan Davidson/O’Reilly Media”

The title should really be “Marc eyes the fancy phones that the other hp guys have”

In addition to a work-provided nc6000, I also have personal Compaq Armada M700 and gave ubuntu 4.10 a install this evening.

Absolutely no problem installing or having X properly configured! One nice touch is the installer found the Orinoco wireless PCMCIA card and configured it so the network was available immediately on boot.

Here are my notes on install ubuntu 1.0 on an HP/Compaq nc6000 laptop.

Used warty-install-release-i386.iso downloaded on 21-Oct-2004. (md5sum a491903a2d2197651864dec3836d85e0)

The laptop has currently installed WinXP (hda1), Debian/Sarge (hda7) and now ubuntu (hda6).

Booted the laptop while in the docking bay and started install. Complained that it couldn’t find a NIC, I told it to continue and not to use a static IP address.

The nc6000 has:

* Pentium M (should do power management, but stock debian kernels don’t seem to include it), 1G memory, 60g internal drive, 30G or CD/RW in multibay
* embedded intel wireless — works with ndiswrapper
* bluetooth — don’t have any other bluetooth devices, haven’t tried
* IR — haven’t tried, but should try to get going with my palmpilot
* Broadcom nic — works
* SD bay — works under WinXP, but appears to be impossible under Linux

The docking bay pretty much just has a USB breakout, passthrough nic and power. There are 2 multibays which usually have a CD/RW and/or an extra disk.

At the point it asked about installing GRUB in the master boot record, I skipped that and continued
on with the installation. I prefer to let debian/sarge manage grub.

After the ubuntu installer finished, I booted into debian/sarge and added the following to
it’s menu.lst file:

title Ubuntu 1.0
root (hd0, 5)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 ro
initrd /initrd
savedefault
boot

Then rebooted to Ubuntu…

After about 40 minutes it started poking around and found that kacpid was sucking up 95% of the cpu. I did

renice 19 -p 5 (which was the pid of kacpid)

and the install proceeded much faster.

The X displayed looked nice along with the drum sounds.

But the Broadcom or tg3 driver wasn’t loaded. Using ’sudo network-admin’ fixed that.

Still looking around.

[still installing — watch here for more info]

Yesterday I listened to [Adam Curry’s](http://live.curry.com/) Daily Source Code and the Dave Winer collaboration, [Trade Secrets](http://secrets.scripting.com/).

Last night poked around with [ipodder.org](http://www.ipodder.org) and downloaded all the ’stock’ content that came with the [get_enclosures.pl](http://www.ipodder.org/) script.

IT Conversations audio is a gold mine! The only problem is not having enough time to listen to everything that interests me.

I don’t have an ipod (or an [Apple ipod + HP](http://h10049.www1.hp.com/music/us/en/ipod_flash.html)), but the car does have a CD player, so get_enclosures may need to be hacked to burn a daily CD.

A few weeks ago I was at work reading a blog on Microsoft’s developer’s blog site about some lessons learned on a particular development project. Boring project management stuff really. The second comment was along the lines of:

“Good stuff. I’ve just finished defending my masters paper on this same topic. Click here to read it http://www.some-reasonable-looking-site/lastmeasure”

Bam! Tons of popups, moving, resizing windows, really disturbing porn/violent images all over the place, but the best part was the sound — at the loudest volume — ‘HEY EVERYBODY! I’M LOOKING AT GAY PORN!’ repeated over and over and over.

Fortunately I had headphones on at the time and running Firefox on Linux, so killing it was simple.

Sadly, it appears the MS blogger has removed the comment from his site and I’ve X’ed out the
offending site. However if you are clever with google, you’ll be able to find where it has moved to.

Here is the email I passed on to some (now former) friends….

Subject: Hey everybuddy!

Here is a cool new site. Make sure you have the volume turned way
up — it may be hard to hear.

http://XXX.XX/lastmeasure/

It works best in a work environment.

NOT!

Best viewed NOT at work and with the headphones on.

I got the link from one of the comments
of the article “21 Rules of Thumb “ How Microsoft develops its Software”
http://blogs.msdn.com/David_Gristwood/archive/2004/06/24/164849.aspx

This is a much more obnoxious version of the previous URL –
http://XXX.XXXXXXX.XXX/~lysol/lm.swf

HP has a new website to track all things Linux @ hp. You can sign up for Driver, Patch, Security and Support alerts/notifications for just specific products.

[Technology at Work Linux edition](http://www.hp.com/go/linuxnews) (http://www.hp.com/go/linuxnews)

Yeah, yeah, I work at HP, but its still is a handy website.

[

Hewlett-Packard Co. will release the final processor upgrade for its AlphaServer line of Unix servers on Monday.

](http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/16/HNendofalpha_1.html)

Goodbye old friend.

[Check out the tombstone generator](http://tombstone.dogcrap.net/tombstone.php)